Jon Shakill: A Senator offered you a job, but you decided to stick with journalism?

David Asman: That’s correct. It was an interesting offer, but I wasn’t crazy about the idea of leaving journalism, so I decided to call a friend over at the Wall Street Journal named George Malone. I asked him if he thought that taking the press aide job would interfere with my journalistic career. He said “well no, but to tell you the truth, we have something opening up here. We hadn’t thought about you but you may want to apply.” It turns out it was for a new column just starting up on Latin America— this was in 1983. That’s when I flew up to New York and ended up getting that job, so it all worked out great. I had no background on Latin America, but the Journal wanted somebody who was a good writer and editor, who could approach the job with a clean slate, and that turned out to be me. It really turned into two jobs, one was editing the Americas column, and the other was editing the Manger’s Journal which was a pure business column written by managers, for managers. Eventually I ended up editing together all of the articles in the Manager’s Journal into two books called the Wall Street Journal on Management. That actually helped me pay for a little apartment in New York which I still have today.

Jon Shakill: How long were you the Latin America Editor for the Wall Street Journal?

David Asman: I did that for 12 years, and then was asked to be the Op-Ed Editor of the Wall Street Journal, which I did for another 2 years. It was at that time that I was approached by Roger Ailes [President of FOX News]. It was funny, the first time I met Roger was at a luncheon for Fidel Castro at the residence of Mort Zuckerman. I was seated between Roger, and the late Bill Safire who was a columnist for the New York Times. That was when Roger offered me a job, which I wasn’t that interested in at the time because of my antipathy towards television news, but he convinced me he was going to do something totally different. He also sweetened the deal significantly enough so that a year later I ended up accepting his offer to work on FOX Business Network, and I’ve been here ever since.